The present doctoral research is a reading proposal of Una sola muerte numerosa (1996), a testimonial novel written by the Argentinean author —and survivor of the concentration, torture, and extermination camp “Club Atlético”— Nora Strejilevich. To do so, it parts from one of the silenced matters throughout the tradition of thought; this is the question relative to the sense (to the question of why) that the victim’s pain and suffering poses when another being inflicts it. While Philosophy has addressed the subject matter of evil and violence from the perspective of the perpetrator (the agent), or, has studied the provenance from the myth perspective of both theodicy and theology, the figure of the one that suffered the wrongdoing was neglected until the advent of the Shoah, which led to the emergence of the “Witness Era”, a term by Annette Wieviorka, that marks the moment when testimonial writing awakes interest.
In Latin America, this kind of writings have been conceptualised as a new literary genre by the critic community in the 1980s. This is why, in the first chapter, the critical effort to construct a definition for this new genre is revised, as well as the different genealogies and the taxonomies that were proposed at the time. The debates that proliferate around this discursive modality are also revised. In this same chapter, testimony is presented as aporetical from a philosophical point of view, and it works as the link between History and memory from the most recent critical approaches to the subject that have been carried out in Memory Studies. All of this is done with the purpose of building an appropriate theoretical frame for the study of Nora Strejilevich’s testimonial writing, comprised by the cited novel and numerous short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies since the year 2000.
The second chapter analyses the historical context of the last Argentinean military dictatorship (1976-1983), considered to be, by some historians and sociologists, a reorganizing social genocide. This is the reason why it is pertinent to revise Shoah’s philosophy, because of the connections and the common ground that it maintains with totalitarian power and the disappearing power technologies implemented in the Latin American country. The main goal is to analyse the role of torture and the reflections that surface around the victims’ pain and suffering, victims that become witnesses and survivors of these also called “concentration camps”.
Once the study about pain and torture is conducted, the research focuses, now on the third chapter, in the po/ethics of the act of listening that is proposed in Strejilevich’s testimonial novel. With this term it is intended to manifest the movement that is carried through from the discipline of Philosophy to that of Ethics, Art, and narrative —the Est/Ethics—, because it is considered to be an appropriate ground for experience construction, which has to provide a basis to contemporary thought. In other words, parting from Philosophy (Adorno, Arendt, Cavarero, Butler), one is urged to listen to the ethical claim that is formulated in testimonial writing. Thus, a new comprehensive map is presented, one that is not only focused on representation (embedded to vision’s conceptual sphere), but in the auditory (receiving the scream as the maximum horror expression that cannot be seen because of its fiendishness, but it can be heard). This is the main hypothesis of this investigation.
Finally, an intertextual reading is carried out between the work of Nora Strejilevich and other testimonies, such as the ones written by Jean Améry and Jacobo Timerman, to give account of the diversity that testimonial writing ensues, and that it can be considered to be related to death, but also to life, as it is an act that is not only the beginning of something: a testimony becomes an habitable and permanent dwelling place; but most importantly, a testimony is the beginning of someone: a survivor that tries to give account of the political defeat and the resistance to be forgotten.